


Where No Human Has Gone Before

by ezrakeshet



Category: Star Trek
Genre: Before Enterprise, Between Seasons/Series, First Contact, Pre-Starfleet, Vulcan Culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-07-09 01:21:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19879252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ezrakeshet/pseuds/ezrakeshet
Summary: The story of the first humans on Vulcan and the beginnings of their diplomatic relationship. This is from the point of view of the leader of the Earth delegation and their impressions of the planet and the people.





	Where No Human Has Gone Before

May 4, 2061  
Today, for the first time ever, I stood on an alien planet. We arrived at Vulcan last night and orbited the planet, waiting for dawn to reach the capital city. I couldn’t sleep; I just stared out the window at the red surface below our ship, imagining what it would look like on the ground. Of course, I had seen pictures before. Vulcan made first contact with Earth over a year ago, and every human has seen at least one picture of their planet. But I knew that the alien world below would look immensely different when seeing it through my own eyes and not just a camera lens.  
We set down outside the capital, Shi’Kahr, in a shuttle in the midmorning. Vulcan is absolutely incomparable to anything on Earth. The sky was a deep reddish-orange, and the sun hung low in the sky, beating down on us in the desert heat. The air was thin and oppressively hot, with only the occasional warm breeze. Our guides, aware that they had evolved for the climate and the increased gravity and we had not, continuously offered to stop and let us rest on the way to the city. They even offered us a tri-ox compound to make up for the lower oxygen of the atmosphere, but we declined. (Whatever you want to say about humans, we’re nothing if not stubborn.) Beyond the orange sands of the desert, a mountain range loomed on the horizon. On the tallest mountain, Mount Seleya, I could barely make out a few spires with bridges and a small building. Our consulting Vulcan, Sivok, explained that Mount Seleta is a holy place, and the building I spotted is a temple. Dotting the lower parts of the mountains were small entrances to caves. The expanse of desert where we landed is the harshest place on the planet, called The Forge, and the caves provided shelter from the violent electrical storms and wild animals before Vulcans formed cities. Sivok told me in detail about the le-matya, a predatory animal with poisonous claws that lives in the foothills of the mountain on the other side of The Forge. Despite his assurances that we were completely safe, I couldn’t help but imagine the huge beast sprinting across the desert to our shuttlecraft and mauling us to death. I’m still unsettled by the thought that it may come back into the city in the night, somehow escaping detection, creeping along the streets, searching for prey.  
Seeing Shi’Kahr was what truly made it sink in that I was on an alien world. Huge earthen columns, connected by long, skinny bridges, rose out of the ground at the outskirts of the city. Atop the columns were strange stone structures, clearly not naturally formed but still ancient and worn by time. The buildings of the city were gathered in a circle within the columns, connected by roads radiating from the center of the city in a sunburst. In the center of the city itself were huge, pointed, metallic spires, standing starkly against the red sky and mountainous background. Surrounding these spires were smaller buildings, homes, connected by a circular grid of smaller roads made of packed-down red dirt. Sivok pointed out the two largest buildings to me as we approached the city and told me that these are the most important buildings in Shi’Kahr: the Vulcan High Command and Shirkahr Academy. The other spires are various research centers, and the smallest of these nonresidential buildings are the temples.  
It was afternoon by the time we reached the Vulcan High Command in the center of Shi’Kahr. Our group of three humans and a Vulcan caused some passersby to raise their pointed, angular eyebrows in carefully controlled displays of surprise, or perhaps disapproval. The city was busy, but not bustling in the same way that Earth cities are. Vulcans, in their unfailing logic and composure, speak to each other quietly and with little inflection, so despite the multitude of people the streets were eerily hushed. On Earth, it’s easy to forget that humans are as alien to Vulcans as they are to us, but being surrounded by them made me feel out of place. I caught myself staring at a man who passed by us, giving no indication to his thoughts other than a slight raise of his angular eyebrow, and wondering if this was his first time seeing a human in the flesh. Were my pink skin and round ears as strange to him as his green-tinged skin and pointed ears were to me?  
Our first meeting with the Vulcan High Council was clearly not as productive as they would have liked. They were hospitable, but not warm, and thanked us for meeting with them. We briefly discussed the prospect of an alliance between our two peoples, but the sun was sinking in the sky and we were exhausted from our walk into Shi’Kahr, so we agreed to talk in further detail tomorrow. I’m excited by the idea of being the one to forge a friendship with another planet, even if the people of that planet are sometimes frustrating. Isn’t that the nature of difference, though? The Vulcans have a saying: Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

May 5, 2061  
Last night, before I went to sleep, Sivok told me about the history of the Vulcan people and why they so stubbornly insist on being entirely logical and unemotional. The Vulcans were once incredibly emotional and violent, and were constantly at war with each other. Despite this constant warfare, or perhaps because of it, they were able to make great strides in technology. This technological advancement combined with their natural predisposition to homicidal rage and paranoia threatened the extinction of the entire species. Out of this chaos rose a philosopher, Surak, who proposed a system of emotional control and ethics based in logic, sparking the Time of Awakening. Surak’s philosophy spread rapidly across Vulcan, and most, but not all, seeing the impending doom of their people, accepted it. A small minority rejected Surak’s philosophy and started a war, during which Surak himself was killed. Eventually those who disagreed with Surak’s message, or as Sivok put it, “opposed logic”, left Vulcan. It’s unknown what happened to them next. Surak’s works are the most important literature on Vulcan, and from his philosophy the Vulcans rebuilt their culture while still trying to salvage as much as they could of what came before.  
How strange that the Vulcans, priding themselves on being entirely logical creatures, would choose to ally themselves with humanity! We also nearly destroyed ourselves countless times, but instead of rejecting our emotions we worked through them together out of necessity. If the Vulcans don’t repress their emotions, are their violent instincts really so intense that they couldn’t help but destroy themselves? Is there no middle ground for them, no way to address their emotions without violence? I thought that humanity would learn from Vulcan and not the other way around, but after hearing this story I can’t help but wonder if we could teach them a thing or two. I’d never tell them that, of course. As different as the Vulcans are from humans, they’re just as stubborn as we are, if not more so. Maybe we’re really not so different after all.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for an English class, where the prompt was simply "write about a place." So of course, I wrote Star Trek fanfiction. I tried to stay as close to canon as I could, but there may be some inconsistencies. Please leave kudos and a comment if you enjoyed this!


End file.
